Our old friend Seton Motley is unveiling a new web site that points out that as bad as the Solyndra deal was for taxpayers, the GM deal is set to be many, many times worse:
We’ve spent the last two-plus weeks rightly freaking out about the 1/2 billion dollars we lost on Solyndra. Government Motors (GM) will most likely end up losing us 20–30 times that much — somewhere between $10 and $20 billion. Yikes.
We the People own 500 million shares of GM stock. For us to break even, these shares have to be sold at $53 per. Right now, they’re trading at around $20. If we sell at $20 — we lose $16.5 billion. (The post-bankruptcy IPO price was $34. A bankruptcy, by the way, the bailout was supposed to preclude. They could have gone into bankruptcy without our $50 billion, yes?)
The website’s tote board of the loss we will suffer is tied into the live stock price — as the price moves, the site recalculates the 500 million shares, so it is constantly displaying the live, current taxpayer loss were the shares sold at that moment.
. . . GM is currently sitting on about $34 billion in cash. Why don’t they take that cash — and buy us out, and make us whole? Again, at $53 per share, that’s $26.5 billion. Taxpayers break even, GM still has more than $7 billion liquid — and the market isn’t flooded with shares, thusly avoiding the aforementioned downward-spiral stock price run.
Seton says the site will include a petition for a pledge: “I will not buy any Government Motors products until they’ve paid back American taxpayers.” He says “the idea for the pledge came from the myriad Comments left on every GM piece I’ve written. Time and time again, multiple people per piece were publicly pledging not to buy GM until we again received our coin (if ever again). We have simply built a place for them to all pledge together.”